So what do sheep dream of?

Posts Tagged ‘nightmare’

I was watching the Green Bay Packers play a preseason game. A routine play suddenly ended with 4 or 5 Packers laying motionless on the field. Jermichael Finley lay with a horribly contorted knee. The camera zoomed up to his face and he was screaming in agony.

I just returned yesterday from a near week long whitewater rafting trip down the Snake River in Idaho/Oregon. I take one or two rafting trips a year (sometimes three if I’m lucky) and it is one of my main hobbies. It is strange then, that it does not pop up in my dreams more often; just once since I started this blog in fact.

Due to the technologically isolated nature of floating on an inflatable raft for several days down a rushing river in the wilderness, I was unable to promptly record my dreams upon waking as I have been. All I have of those memories of things that didn’t happen are fragments, a few of which I shall share with you now.

One instance was pretty much the worst dream ever. It involved alien slugs taking over people’s brains and controlling them as they started bashing people’s skulls in with rocks. There was an orgy of blood and sex that resulted in a woman painfully and willfully giving birth to an alien slug by ripping it out of herself. That one certainly woke me up screaming to an imagined image of my brother’s silhouette standing in a doorway staring at me.

That was not the only nightmarish dream I had on the trip. This is interesting, because I very rarely have scary dreams. Perhaps the looming stress of my employment (or lack thereof) situation is affecting my psyche. The second nightmare had some positive aspects to it though. It started with a grayed-out corpse of a woman crawling towards me with severed stumps for arms. After the initial shock of that sight, I realized I was dreaming and had a brief flash of lucidity where I was able to clamp down on the dream. These are the best words I can use to describe the feeling. It just felt like my brain got a firm grip on a situation it did not like happening and turned the woman’s arms into hammers instead of bloody stumps. It was an improvement for sure, but why hammers I cannot say.

I was pretty nervous. It’s not every day that you’re selected to be Earth’s ambassador to aliens about to make first contact. They were scheduled to land in my backyard at 8:00 PM sharp. I knocked back a double shot of Crystal Head vodka to calm my jitters and glanced at the clock.

“Shit!” I exclaimed. “It’s 8:00 right now!” A piece of chewing gum flew out of my mouth as I spoke. I looked out my back window. The swimming pool took up most of the yard. Its water reached all the way up to the base of the window frame. A sudden flash of bright light lit the pool and three spotlights beamed down from above. A red and white rocket ship straight out of a 1950’s serial gently glided down to rest hovering a few feet above the water’s surface. I was surprised to see the ship was only about six feet tall.

I pressed my face close against the glass trying to get a better look. A sudden metallic clank accompanied the door on the bottom of the rocket flying open. Something shot down out of the rocket into the pool. In a split second a shape flew through the water and burst up to the surface to strike the window in front of my face. A small grotesque alien with terribly mutated features was plastered against the glass. It let out a horrible bleating noise, like a goat being skinned alive. I screamed.